The development of mobile communication devices and mobile networks has advanced at a rapid rate. At first, analog mobile networks enabled voice communication and simple paging features. Later, digital mobile networks provided more advanced features for voice and data communication, such as encryption, caller identification and short message service (SMS) text messages. More recently, third generation (3G) mobile IP network technology is being developed to enable users to easily access content rich media, information and entertainment with mobile devices.
As mobile devices and mobile networks have advanced, and more data has become available to the users, service providers have started offering different levels of service to their users based on need. For example, a business may need a higher level of service for a financial transaction than an individual subscriber may need to play a game. These differentiated service (DiffServ) classes can also help service providers utilize the available bandwidth more efficiently. Additionally, the service classes enable a service provider to help set a minimum level of quality-of-service (QoS) for their users.
In order to realize the service classes, network equipment typically needs to deploy queuing systems in front of links and other resources with limited capacity. The problem arises since current standards related to Differentiated Services allow quite a wide range of individual implementations of service differentiation. In addition, network operators may choose to use even the same network equipment in quite many different ways to support their own view of service differentiation. This may easily lead to a problem that network equipment vendors need to develop different implementations of queuing systems for supporting different ways to use service differentiation. Obviously, there is a need for solutions that allow wide range of different service differentiation schemes to be deployed with the same implementation in a configurable way.